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That was my ambition, but for reasons that had nothing to with my intentions, I had to wait till I was 36 to get married.
And I didn't want my only son to follow my footsteps.
So, on his 26th birthday, I asked him if he was ready and willing to get married. And he replied in the affirmative to both.
So, that evening I put up his resume' in a popular marriage portal. And within a week I was flooded with more than a hundred responses most of which were quite unsuitable and quite a few fake.
We were left with half a dozen matches that I wished to pursue. But my wife struck them down one by one saying that she was allergic to brides having lawyers or policemen or businessmen or bureaucrats or etc as relatives.
I could sense that she was jittery...unlike me, she preferred a daughter-in-law she could to live with under a single roof with a single kitchen.
And four months passed with nothing to show up and I was getting nervous. It then happened that I traveled to my mom's place at Gudur for her 85th birthday celebrations. And then, out of the blue, a gentleman turned up there from Nellore offering his daughter as a suitable bride for my son. And he was a teacher. And my wife couldn't say no to a family of teachers, having got married famously to one of that ilk.
Then on things moved very fast...horoscopes tallied, photos exchanged, three rounds of bridal interviews held and passed...everything going swimmingly. But I insisted that we wouldn't announce the engagement till my wife and I sat formally with the bride's mom and dad over a cup of tea and seal the deal with so-called negotiations.
So we invited them to our place in Hyderabad and met up for three hours writing down, in black and white, details like when the wedding would take place, the gifts to be exchanged, the venue of the wedding and the reception, the hotels where rooms would be booked for guests, the menu, the transport, the band baja, the purohits, and the whole blessed deal short of the honeymoon...it came to a 14-point charter signed and sealed by both parties.
All this was of course my excuse for reading the minds of the parents of the bride...the chemistry.
That evening I was in a celebratory mood. My cousin, Mr R, a good 15 years younger to me, and his wife, Ms V, both physics postgraduates, were then living in a lane beside ours. And I invited them for a party at the cute hotel, Atithi Inn, for a family dinner...a close tete-a-tete affair.
My wife, my son, and I were sitting on one side of the dining table while R and V occupied the other side.
And I was in a great talkative mood, narrating in expansive detail how and where and when the deal came up and went through, while my wife sat silent by my side as usual. R and my son started talking shop between themselves, how was business, what sights you saw in the US and Europe, and how your trip to the Corbett Land in the Himalayas went, and such.
Suddenly R shrieked in pain...apparently his wife, V, hit him on his ankle under the table to stop talking nonsense and listen to the most interesting story I was narrating. Both R and my son kept quiet for a couple of minutes and restarted their trivia talk...another hit and another groan...and it went on like that for the entire couple of hours our dinner took to finish.
And Ms V was still not quite content.
So, I invited them both to our apartment promising that I would show them the four photos of the bride in various poses and one with her dad. And also a copy of the 14-point charter we signed.
V was smiling wholehearted approval to my invite, while her hubby started saying, another time, it is too late, his son was preparing for JEE and needs help at home, and stuff.
Another hit on the ankle and another groan.
Anyway they both came down to our place and, as my wife prepared tea, my son and R restarted their trivia while Ms V sat immersed for a whole hour scanning the four photos and the document that we signed.
But said nothing...no-thing...
As they were preparing to leave, V alerted her hubby with another hit on the ankle that it would be discourteous on his part not even to look at the bride's photos.
And passed on the four photos to her hubby who absentmindedly started flipping them, still talking to my son about the Kumaon hills and how they got spoiled in the last century...
And suddenly, he fell silent, and said:
"Why, I know this gentleman!...He was our teacher in school...and his daughter....how big she has grown!...I saw her as a 4-year-old...nice people, nice family...as I was saying, Jim Corbett would die a hundred deaths if he were to come alive and see for himself how dirty his favorite Nainital is now...."
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"beta! bade ho ke kya banogey?" ("Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?")
"aadmi banoonga" ("I want to be a man")
"aadmi tho banogey lekin karogey kya?" ("Of course you will be a man, but what do you want to do?")
"shaadi karoonga" ("I want to do marriage")
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That was my ambition, but for reasons that had nothing to with my intentions, I had to wait till I was 36 to get married.
And I didn't want my only son to follow my footsteps.
So, on his 26th birthday, I asked him if he was ready and willing to get married. And he replied in the affirmative to both.
So, that evening I put up his resume' in a popular marriage portal. And within a week I was flooded with more than a hundred responses most of which were quite unsuitable and quite a few fake.
We were left with half a dozen matches that I wished to pursue. But my wife struck them down one by one saying that she was allergic to brides having lawyers or policemen or businessmen or bureaucrats or etc as relatives.
I could sense that she was jittery...unlike me, she preferred a daughter-in-law she could to live with under a single roof with a single kitchen.
And four months passed with nothing to show up and I was getting nervous. It then happened that I traveled to my mom's place at Gudur for her 85th birthday celebrations. And then, out of the blue, a gentleman turned up there from Nellore offering his daughter as a suitable bride for my son. And he was a teacher. And my wife couldn't say no to a family of teachers, having got married famously to one of that ilk.
Then on things moved very fast...horoscopes tallied, photos exchanged, three rounds of bridal interviews held and passed...everything going swimmingly. But I insisted that we wouldn't announce the engagement till my wife and I sat formally with the bride's mom and dad over a cup of tea and seal the deal with so-called negotiations.
So we invited them to our place in Hyderabad and met up for three hours writing down, in black and white, details like when the wedding would take place, the gifts to be exchanged, the venue of the wedding and the reception, the hotels where rooms would be booked for guests, the menu, the transport, the band baja, the purohits, and the whole blessed deal short of the honeymoon...it came to a 14-point charter signed and sealed by both parties.
All this was of course my excuse for reading the minds of the parents of the bride...the chemistry.
That evening I was in a celebratory mood. My cousin, Mr R, a good 15 years younger to me, and his wife, Ms V, both physics postgraduates, were then living in a lane beside ours. And I invited them for a party at the cute hotel, Atithi Inn, for a family dinner...a close tete-a-tete affair.
My wife, my son, and I were sitting on one side of the dining table while R and V occupied the other side.
And I was in a great talkative mood, narrating in expansive detail how and where and when the deal came up and went through, while my wife sat silent by my side as usual. R and my son started talking shop between themselves, how was business, what sights you saw in the US and Europe, and how your trip to the Corbett Land in the Himalayas went, and such.
Suddenly R shrieked in pain...apparently his wife, V, hit him on his ankle under the table to stop talking nonsense and listen to the most interesting story I was narrating. Both R and my son kept quiet for a couple of minutes and restarted their trivia talk...another hit and another groan...and it went on like that for the entire couple of hours our dinner took to finish.
And Ms V was still not quite content.
So, I invited them both to our apartment promising that I would show them the four photos of the bride in various poses and one with her dad. And also a copy of the 14-point charter we signed.
V was smiling wholehearted approval to my invite, while her hubby started saying, another time, it is too late, his son was preparing for JEE and needs help at home, and stuff.
Another hit on the ankle and another groan.
Anyway they both came down to our place and, as my wife prepared tea, my son and R restarted their trivia while Ms V sat immersed for a whole hour scanning the four photos and the document that we signed.
But said nothing...no-thing...
As they were preparing to leave, V alerted her hubby with another hit on the ankle that it would be discourteous on his part not even to look at the bride's photos.
And passed on the four photos to her hubby who absentmindedly started flipping them, still talking to my son about the Kumaon hills and how they got spoiled in the last century...
And suddenly, he fell silent, and said:
"Why, I know this gentleman!...He was our teacher in school...and his daughter....how big she has grown!...I saw her as a 4-year-old...nice people, nice family...as I was saying, Jim Corbett would die a hundred deaths if he were to come alive and see for himself how dirty his favorite Nainital is now...."
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